Becoming Indian

BECOMING INDIAN The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century one Opening Often when we are about to leave a place, we find out what really matters, what people care about, what rattles around inside their hearts. So it was for me at the end of fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tahlequah, Oklahoma—the heart of the Cherokee Nation—where I lived in 1995 and 1996 and where I have returned on a regular basis ever since. On the eve of my first departure, a number of Cherokee people, particularly tribal employees, started directing my attention toward an intriguing and at times disturbing phenomenon. This is how in late April 1996 I found myself screening a video with five Cherokee Nation employees, two of whom worked in the executive offices, the others for the Cherokee Advocate, the official tribal newspaper.1 Several of them had insisted that if I was going to write about Cherokee identity pol- itics,2 I needed to see this particular video. A woman from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina had shot the original footage, having traveled all the way to Portsmouth, Ohio, in July 1987 to record the unusual proceedings. The images she captured were so powerful that tribal employees in Oklahoma and North Carolina were still expressing confusion and resentment almost a decade later. Though it was in terrible shape from repeated dubbing, the video gripped our attention. Not only had it been shot surreptitiously, with the novice filmmaker and her companion posing as news reporters, but also our version was a copy of a copy of a copy that had been passed hand to hand, like some weird Grateful Dead bootleg, www.sarpress.sarweb.org 1 making its way through Indian country from the eastern seaboard to the lower Midwest. I recall asking myself why these two Cherokee women felt the need to engage in guerilla-style filmmaking and hide their identities as Eastern Band tribal members—and what subject could have so captivated Cherokee audiences around the country and had such staying power that they still found it meaningful, even critically so. The answers were not simple. Sitting on uncomfortable office furniture in the tribal complex, we watched an effort at repatriation that took place in 1987, three years prior to the passage of the Native American Graves Protection Repatriation Act in 1990. During this event, the five-thousand-year-old remains of forty-seven Native Americans were handed over for reburial to a group of amateur genealogists who had decided to form a Cherokee Indian tribe.4 Who were these people? This was the great mystery of the video. My viewing companions had their own answers: fake Indians, New Age poseurs, “wannabes.” Though the terms made me wince, it seemed that everyone in the room expected me to share their perspective and to do something about it—they assumed that I would write some sort of anthropological exposé. Instead, I found myself wondering how we could tell whether these people were really Indian, or Cherokee, or not, and on what basis such decisions should be made. The prelude to this seemingly bizarre turn of events had taken place only a year before the tape was made. In fall 1986, David Kuhn, a lawyer and an avid amateur archaeologist who was working under the auspices of the Scioto County Board of Commissioners, had unearthed an archaic Indian village in an area near present-day Portsmouth, Ohio. When the news became public, a local man named Oliver Collins began to lobby the commissioners, arguing that the remains were a part of his people’s history and needed to be reinterred. Collins was and is a local leader of the Tallige Fire Cherokee Nation, a group of self-identified Cherokees that is not federally recognized but has been acknowledged by the state of Ohio in a state senate proclamation. According to Collins, the Tallige Fire community claimed kinship with the remains, not as direct descendants but as ostensible Cherokees. Because they identified them- selves as American Indians, they felt that they had a right not only to possess the remains but also to rebury these in whatever manner they saw fit. Skeptical of these assertions, a Scioto County commissioner said, “I don’t know who [the remains] belong to. They don’t belong to me and they don’t belong to the tribe that’s here. I guess, like us, they were children to God and that’s where He wanted them, back in the ground” (Dayton Daily News, July 20, 1987). In what appeared to be a goodwill gesture toward Native American concerns, the Scioto County Board of Commissioners granted the Tallige Fire community its request. The remains of the forty-seven indi- viduals were handed over for reburial in a large, media-driven spectacle with nearly two hundred people in attendance. This was the event that the two amateur filmmak- ers documented. Several things struck me as I sat there watching this video, hearing the groans and laughter of my friends and acquaintances in the Cherokee Nation offices. First were 2 BECOMING INDIAN COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL the very public nature of what would normally be a private event and the way in which the media and crowd eagerly gathered to watch the exotic display. The tape began with what seemed to be a representative clip from the local news, with the reporter describing in reverential tones the four-day ritual reburial, but the images that fol- lowed were a little off. I was struck by the odd regalia—hospital smocks for the men and Pocahontas-style, off-the-shoulder dresses for the women—that were worn during the ritual. This uniform style of dress among the forty or so Tallige Fire community members must have been part of a deliberate plan, for they stood in sharp relief to the gathered crowd in cutoff jeans and sleeveless Whisky River T-shirts, trying to beat the midday summer sun. Without the differences in dress, it would have been hard to tell who was who, because all of the participants, including the Tallige Fire Cherokees, appeared at least on the surface to be working-class whites, given their skin color, clothing, and mannerisms and the long line of beat-up Dodge pickups and Pontiac sedans parked at the side of the road. Although their complicated histories and identities lay far beneath what might be gleaned from an old videotape or a casual observation, it was clear that Tallige Fire community members viewed the repatriation as an opportunity to validate their kinship claims to Indian ancestors. After the initial news clip, the video showed the reburial ceremony in all of its elaborate detail, with step-by-step explanations from Oliver Collins and other Tallige Fire leaders, who wanted the crowd to know what was going on and why it had larger cultural significance. I watched as each of the senior women of the tribe carried a small wooden casket to the edge of a large hole, approximately 15 feet deep and 20 feet in diameter. As they gingerly lowered the caskets to the men, who smudged them with burning sage, cedar, and tobacco and placed them carefully in a circle around a central fire, Oliver Collins would say something cryptic like this: “The ceremony in front of you is very old…lost to history, it’s been going on so long.”5 At times he was a bit less mysterious: “We are sanctifying this ground. The sacred fire will burn the entire time we are reinterring the bodies and then be put out, but the coals will remain here forever.” Regardless of the specific language he used and his clarity or lack thereof, this seemed to me, and to most of the people watching the video with me, to be some kind of performance in which the Tallige Fire members were “playing Indian” in an effort to authenticate their status as a Native American community and that they did so in a manner that was inconsistent—at times, seeming secure in their identity claims and at others, more tentative.6 At one point, when pressed about the origins of the group, Collins told the news media, “These people [gathered here] are of Cherokee descent.… We are in association with the Cherokee Nation. That’s the first step. We want to belong, if we can prove our bloodlines. We are amateur genealogists. That’s what we are.”7 But only moments later, he said that the group was “bringing [its] forefathers and foremothers back to their home” and that his people needed “to say prayers to [their] deceased.” Though I noted the many inconsistencies in his statements, it was clear that Collins held fast to the belief that he and other members of the Tallige Fire community had Cherokee ancestry, www.sarpress.sarweb.org OPENING 3 despite not being able to prove it. What had begun as a genealogical association of people interested in documenting their Indian ancestry seemed to be morphing before my eyes into a tribe, or at least into a group of people who wanted to belong to a tribe and who seemed comfortable with performing that moment of desire as Cherokees. Although these contortions were disorienting to watch and raised many questions, for me what was most striking was the great number of children who were innocently participating in the day’s events—babies in their mothers’ arms, young children and teenagers, sweltering away in the late July heat, patiently helping to stoke fires and lower tiny caskets, meant only to hold a handful of bones, down ladders.

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